Job Offer from October 01, 2026
The Machine Visual Culture research group at the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome is looking for prospective PhD candidates interested in applying to the Max Planck AI + X programme (MP-AIX) and potentially working with Leonardo Impett as a supervisor.
The MP-AIX programme funds PhD students to work on interdisciplinary research around artificial intelligence, co-supervised across two different Max Planck Institutes. Eligible Max Planck faculty are visible here: https://ai.mpg.de/members
We are interested in ambitious interdisciplinary projects at the intersection of AI with visual culture, art history, image theory, critical AI studies, or visual digital humanities.
We are looking for candidates with genuinely interdisciplinary interests and at least some technical background or training. This might come from computer science, engineering, data science or computational humanities; equally, we welcome technically trained candidates who want to develop a much stronger engagement with the humanities.
Successful candidates would join the Machine Visual Culture group in Rome and work with a second supervisor elsewhere in the Max Planck Society. Depending on the project and supervisory constellation, doctoral registration could potentially be through our International Max Planck Research School for Multimodal Digital Humanities with the University of Zurich, or through the University of Cambridge.
The current MP-AIX call is for the 2027 cohort, with applications due 31 October 2026. Application is done through the ELLIS portal. https://ai.mpg.de/how-to-join-phd